2020-06-07T06:08:31ZThe Choice of Acculturation Strategies: Intercultural Adaptation of International Students from Sub-Saharan African Francophone Countries in Ontariohttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37479
The Choice of Acculturation Strategies: Intercultural Adaptation of International Students from Sub-Saharan African Francophone Countries in Ontario
Coco Avolonto, Aurore
According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (2019), the number of foreign students studying in Canadian public colleges and universities rose 16.25% in 2018 for an overall increase of 73% in the five years since 2014. The number of international students aspiring to obtain a degree in Canadian higher education institutions has been increasingly growing. Yet, attending post-secondary institutions in a culture different from ones own may result in challenges of cross-cultural adaptations. Black-African international students are not different in this regard. Based on a mixed methods research, the study draws from Berrys (1997) fourfold acculturation theory, Kims (1988) integrative communication theory and LaFramboise et al. (1993) bicultural competence model to investigate the international students from Sub-Saharan African francophone countries choice of acculturation strategies as well as their overall intercultural adaptation in bilingual post-secondary institutions in Ontario. Results from the quantitative analysis revealed assimilation as preferred acculturation mode while qualitative analysis identified both integration and separation as preferred strategies. The participants reported support from academic staff but also a significant lack of information, and difficulties adapting to the teaching style.
2020-05-11T00:00:00ZRefusing the End of History: The Politics and Aesthetics of Castorf's Volksbhnehttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37468
Refusing the End of History: The Politics and Aesthetics of Castorf's Volksbhne
Korte, Christine Andrea
From 1992 to 2017, the cultural landscape of Berlin was contested and shaped by the Volksbhne under its artistic director, Frank Castorf. Throughout his tenure, Castorf refused the liberal democratic consensus euphorically proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He made his theatre a space for working through the collapse of socialism and Fukuyamas end of history. Castorfs responses to postsocialismhis contouring of the historic theatre institution and his stagecraftconstituted a refusal of the dominant narrative of history and are the focus of this dissertation. I show how Castorf transformed the dogmatic state-funded theatre into a venue for radical politics and avant-garde aesthetics. During the fractious post-Wende period and beyond, Castorf played a public role as polemicist, cultural diagnostician, and prognosticator. At the nexus between the extreme Right and Left, Castorf mined for critiques of liberal democracy and linear narratives of progress. With Jnger and Schmitt on the Right, and Benjamin, Mller and iek on the Left, Castorfs intellectual genealogy is woven from a promiscuous engagement of Marx and Nietzsche. Castorf used the theatre and these traditions of intellectual thought to channel the wide-spread ressentiment, disorientation and hopelessness wrought by the demise of the Eastern Bloc and rapid Westernization. For Castorf, the only way to deal with these discontents was to shed light upon the temptations of illiberal reaction on behalf of those individuals disenchanted with post-Wende society. Here, Castorf drew a strong parallel to Berlin in the 1920s, focusing specifically on Conservative Revolutionary thought and events in and around the historic Volksbhne. The same dark forces lurking on the horizon of Weimar Germany inform Castorfs reception of the present in his dramaturgy. The dissertation develops chronologically and establishes three stages of Castorfs theory-praxis relationship: the mania of the 1990s; the melancholy of his Russian Turn in the early 2000s, and the foregrounding of epic and political theatre strategies coinciding with the 2008 financial crisis. His productions were anarchic events that turned the dramatic canon into occasions for satire, slapstick, digression and ultimately ambivalence. Creating openings, Castorf revived forgotten local and site-specific histories that he hoped would revitalize a proletarian consciousness. Refusing closure, this dissertation makes the case for Castorfs Volksbhne as an archive for an alternative socialist imaginary, conveying the utopian spirit of what the GDR might have been.
2020-05-11T00:00:00ZThe Black-Sheep of the Canadian Book Trade: An Exploration of the Current State of Self-Publishing in Canadahttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37426
The Black-Sheep of the Canadian Book Trade: An Exploration of the Current State of Self-Publishing in Canada
Poliakova, Elizaveta
The following thesis explores the exclusion of the self-publisher from the publishing sector in Canada. Even though the self-publisher has been a part of the Canadian publishing sector since the 1960s, this type of business model is not acknowledged as a legitimate form of book production. The thesis utilizes mixed methods to create a metanarrative of how the self-publisher is viewed in the publishing industry. The quantitative portion of the thesis employs descriptive statistics in order to summarise the data of how the Canada Book Fund was distributed over a three-year period from 2016-2018. The qualitative portion utilizes a narrative policy analysis of various government documents including the Canada Book Fund guidelines, Creative Canada policy framework, and the guidelines of the different provincial art councils. Through this analysis the study highlights the discourse around self-publishing and how the self-publisher is excluded from the funding models. Furthermore, the reports of the key players of the industry similarly do not acknowledge the self-publisher as a legitimate member of the book trade. The last section investigates what concepts/themes/ideas self-publishers emphasise about the self-publishing industry themselves, which are agency and legitimacy. Through recognizing the discourse linked to the self-publishing infrastructure, the thesis concludes with some suggestion on how to alter this infrastructure in order for the self-publisher to become a legitimate member of the Canadian publishing industry.
2020-05-11T00:00:00ZThe Domestication of Voice Activated -Technology & EavesMining: Surveillance, Privacy and Gender Relations at Homehttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/36841
The Domestication of Voice Activated -Technology & EavesMining: Surveillance, Privacy and Gender Relations at Home
Neville, Stephen James
This thesis develops a case study analysis of the Amazon Echo, the first-ever voice-activated smart speaker. The domestication of the devices feminine conversational agent, Alexa, and the integration of its microphone and digital sensor technology in home environments represents a moment of radical change in the domestic sphere. This development is interpreted according to two primary force relations: historical gender patterns of domestic servitude and eavesmining (eavesdropping + datamining) processes of knowledge extraction and analysis. The thesis is framed around three pillars of study that together demonstrate: how routinization with voice-activated technology affects acoustic space and ones experiences of home; how online warm experts initiate a dialogue about the domestication of technology that disregards and ignores Amazons corporate privacy framework; and finally, how the technologys conditions of use silently result in the deployment of ever-intensifying surveillance mechanisms in home environments. Eavesmining processes are beginning to construct a new world of media and surveillance where every spoken word can potentially be heard and recorded, and speaking is inseparable from identification.
2019-12-04T00:00:00Z